Software RAID0 on Sf-2281, is TRIM an issue?

[TidusZ]

My plan is to put 2 x 240gb mushkin chronos deluxe sf-2281 drives in RAID0 without a hardware RAID card. Is the garbage collection from the sandforce controller sufficient or is this a bad idea? I leave my pc on 24/7.



I put this in the wrong forum.

Yes, yes you did. Moved from Video to Memory & Storage
-ViRGE

 

[Phynaz]

It's a bad idea because it's been shown that SSD in RAID actually slows them down.

 

[HendrixFan]

It's a bad idea because it's been shown that SSD in RAID actually slows them down.

Where has it been shown that is the case? I run a couple SSDs in RAID-0 and the performance is there. Everything I have seen from others, guys like groberts, reinforces that SSDs benefit from RAID-0. The only limiting factor is the RAID controller and how many drives it takes to max it out.

 

[Elganja]

It's a bad idea because it's been shown that SSD in RAID actually slows them down.

lol what? please link to your source

OP, atm, there is no TRIM for Raid. Intel RST 11.5 is supposed to bring that capability, but they have yet to release a beta version with it enabled. tbh, with my 2 raid 0 arrays, I haven't noticed much degradation at all, but I don't leave my PC on all the time and really just use it for gaming.

What are you using for raid? What does your motherboard support? That will be your limiting factor (ICH10R tops out ~650mb/sec, though some people claim they have gotten over 800MB/sec in benchmarks)

 

[nanaki333]

i've been running raid0 SSDs for literally years now. i've never had my drives slow down. you can do manual TRIM (Tony TRIM) and you can also get fancycache and enable deferred writing to limit the random writes to your drives.

 

[Elganja]

i've been running raid0 SSDs for literally years now. i've never had my drives slow down. you can do manual TRIM (Tony TRIM) and you can also get fancycache and enable deferred writing to limit the random writes to your drives.

never heard of this before... thanks!

 

[nanaki333]

never heard of this before... thanks!

no problem! if you have fancycache, it helps a lot! here's a link to tonytrim. i've been using it for years

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/f...-A-simple-guide-for-speeding-up-EOL-OCZ-SSD-s

 

[Elganja]

no problem! if you have fancycache, it helps a lot! here's a link to tonytrim. i've been using it for years

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/f...-A-simple-guide-for-speeding-up-EOL-OCZ-SSD-s

thanks... about to pickup perfect disk 12.5. Will do this when I get home...

for fancy cache, I just want to make sure I have the right thing...
http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fancy-cache/index.html

it's in beta, is this the version you use?

 

[nanaki333]

yeah, that's the right version. make sure to check off deferred writing and set it to 3600 seconds (1 hour). that should be enough. i set it to 1024MB, the more the better. i should probably up that though

 

[Elganja]

yeah, that's the right version. make sure to check off deferred writing and set it to 3600 seconds (1 hour). that should be enough. i set it to 1024MB, the more the better. i should probably up that though

this may sound like a dumb question, what happens when you turn your computer off w/ < 1 hour.. will those writes get lost? or will it get flushed before the computer turns off (I don't mean loss of power, but actually shutting down)?

sorry if this is a dumb question, just one of my concerns.

 

[nanaki333]

no problem. i believe they get written to your drives as a file, then when you power it back up, it reads the file and rebuilds it all back in the cache.

 

[Elganja]

no problem. i believe they get written to your drives as a file, then when you power it back up, it reads the file and rebuilds it all back in the cache.

gotcha, thanks!

will do tony-trim and fancycache when I get home today. thanks again for pointing me to this, I never knew these existed.

 

[kalrith]

Do you already own the SSDs? If not, wouldn't it be better to just get one ~512GB SSD?

 

[Elganja]

Do you already own the SSDs? If not, wouldn't it be better to just get one ~512GB SSD?

2 256gb hdd's in raid 0 will be faster than one 512GB hdd (not to mention the price differences)

 

[nanaki333]

Do you already own the SSDs? If not, wouldn't it be better to just get one ~512GB SSD?

as stated, 2 in 256GB will be faster than a single 512GB. the price difference between 2 256GB vs a single 512GB used to be a pretty significant difference in price with the 512GB being more. prices have come down quite a bit and the gap isn't as bad, but it's still generally cheaper to get 2 256GB drives.

 

[TidusZ]

Ya I have the SSD's, I ordered them on a really nice sale, although I'm not going to actually have the computer built until ivy bridge is available and I'll be using a z77 board. I figured buying them 2 months early was worth it since the deal was so good, $270 cdn each.

 

[groberts101]

At that deal you can't go wrong to set them aside for a bit. Not like they will drop severely after that type of discount. Makes me wonder how the hell they make money at that price though. lol

as a quick mention to anyone who cares. You CANNOT force ANY Sandforce based drive into actually recovering trimmed blocks immediately since they inherently do it as an afterthough when drive activity is lowest(such as logged-off idle time would allow). Trust me for once.. I've tried harder than most to do it.. and it just won't happen regardless of what you try.

Even Anand eluded to the fact that the Intel 520 cannot be force trimmed back to full speed. Had he gone the extra step to see GC recovery?.. more would have learned the correct way to recover these controllers.

With Sandforce's in raid?.. GC is ALWAYS best overall. Even when we do finally see trim pass-through for raids?.. it will still have little impact on "forcing quicker recovery" on these controllers due to the way they are designed. GC will STILL be best as it allows for so much more physical space optimization to be done during the recovery process.

So, using Tony-Trim(or similar) methods would only be viable on NON-Sandforce controlled drives. Just sayin'.

PS. anyone looking to idle recover an SSD needs to be aware that constant power needs to be maintained to the controller for GC to function uninterupted. S1 sleeps or total elimination of sleep function within OS power mgmt would be required to really allow the drive full recovery time. Good rule of thumb to use is that if your machine powers down?.. so do your SSD's.

 

[Elganja]

At that deal you can't go wrong to set them aside for a bit. Not like they will drop severely after that type of discount. Makes me wonder how the hell they make money at that price though. lol

as a quick mention to anyone who cares. You CANNOT force ANY Sandforce based drive into actually recovering trimmed blocks immediately since they inherently do it as an afterthough when drive activity is lowest(such as logged-off idle time would allow). Trust me for once.. I've tried harder than most to do it.. and it just won't happen regardless of what you try.

Even Anand eluded to the fact that the Intel 520 cannot be force trimmed back to full speed. Had he gone the extra step to see GC recovery?.. more would have learned the correct way to recover these controllers.

With Sandforce's in raid?.. GC is ALWAYS best overall. Even when we do finally see trim pass-through for raids?.. it will still have little impact on "forcing quicker recovery" on these controllers due to the way they are designed. GC will STILL be best as it allows for so much more physical space optimization to be done during the recovery process.

So, using Tony-Trim(or similar) methods would only be viable on NON-Sandforce controlled drives. Just sayin'.

thanks for the heads up... i personally have 4 256gb Crucial M4's on the way to run in Raid 0 (really in prep for ivy bridge, i know my sata 2 ports on my x58 won't do this setup justice)

 

[nanaki333]

So, using Tony-Trim(or similar) methods would only be viable on NON-Sandforce controlled drives. Just sayin'.

i've used only intel drives and recently M4s in raid0. so that does not apply to me either.


the deferred writing with fancycache is a nice addition to any raid SSDs though.

 

[Phynaz]

Where has it been shown that is the case? I run a couple SSDs in RAID-0 and the performance is there. Everything I have seen from others, guys like groberts, reinforces that SSDs benefit from RAID-0. The only limiting factor is the RAID controller and how many drives it takes to max it out.

lol what? please link to your source

OP, atm, there is no TRIM for Raid. Intel RST 11.5 is supposed to bring that capability, but they have yet to release a beta version with it enabled. tbh, with my 2 raid 0 arrays, I haven't noticed much degradation at all, but I don't leave my PC on all the time and really just use it for gaming.

What are you using for raid? What does your motherboard support? That will be your limiting factor (ICH10R tops out ~650mb/sec, though some people claim they have gotten over 800MB/sec in benchmarks)

http://techreport.com/articles.x/22358

 

[Elganja]

http://techreport.com/articles.x/22358

the problems (write speed) is due to the lack of trim support this is known.... Tony-TRIM will solve that (albeit a manual way) and Intel RST 11.5 will solve it as well (although as robert pointed out, it won't help sandforce controller drives).

however, reads, are insanely better in RAID 0... to me, that is the most important thing (esp since writes don't suffer that bad IMHO)

 

[groberts101]

np.. you'd be surprised what the X58 will do with that interim setup. I don't get the huge sequentials with my 6 drive Vertex 2 R0 setup as the 6 series setups.. but from an OS volumes viewpoint in the smaller/randoms?.. it ain't slow.

Just be aware that you will be downclocking the Intel 6G ports to 3G when you span the 6G/3G ports when building that array. Not really as big a deal as some will make it out to be though when you consider it will still hit 1GB R/W speeds and have absolutley massive low end grunt.

It's kinda fun to throw everything you can at it and it still reacts like you're simply writing a small file or opening a single app. And just wait till you do a any disk related scan with that array. "Fast".. doesn't quite cut it. Image restores(from non read speed bottlenecked arrays) are blistering fast as well. Enjoy.

PS. might be a good idea to up the chipset voltages just a bit there too. Think of all that extra bandwidth like a battery being discharged too quickly in the way that it will heat up. Adding voltage can help offset the additional loading up to the point that you hit diminishing return. Which of course will be different for each hardware and cooling solution used and too much voltage gets you right back in the same boat again as having too little. Personally.. I find the factory heat tape to be quite limiting and unable to cope with sudden heat spikes.

Of course we all know it isn't mandatory to do so, but swapping to good TC in place of all the tape and polishing everything possible to mirror finish helped my max OC and raid array's stability big time on my old 6 drive Vertex 30 array. SSD raid(especially wider arrays) just pushes the components/sub-systems that much harder and eats up the little headroom we had with slower disk setups, is all.

 

[Elganja]

np.. you'd be surprised what the X58 will do with that interim setup. I don't get the huge sequentials with my 6 drive Vertex 2 R0 setup as the 6 series setups.. but from an OS volumes viewpoint in the smaller/randoms?.. it ain't slow.

Just be aware that you will be downclocking the Intel 6G ports to 3G when you span the 6G/3G ports when building that array. Not really as big a deal as some will make it out to be though when you consider it will still hit 1GB R/W speeds and have absolutley massive low end grunt.

It's kinda fun to throw everything you can at it and it still reacts like you're simply writing a small file or opening a single app. And just wait till you do a any disk related scan with that array. "Fast".. doesn't quite cut it. Image restores(from non read speed bottlenecked arrays) are blistering fast as well. Enjoy.

PS. might be a good idea to up the chipset voltages just a bit there too. Think of all that extra bandwidth like a battery being discharged too quickly in the way that it will heat up. Adding voltage can help offset the additional loading up to the point that you hit diminishing return. Which of course will be different for each hardware and cooling solution used and too much voltage gets you right back in the same boat again as having too little. Personally.. I find the factory heat tape to be quite limiting and unable to cope with sudden heat spikes.

Of course we all know it isn't mandatory to do so, but swapping to good TC in place of all the tape and polishing everything possible to mirror finish helped my max OC and raid array's stability big time on my old 6 drive Vertex 30 array. SSD raid(especially wider arrays) just pushes the components/sub-systems that much harder and eats up the little headroom we had with slower disk setups, is all.

will look into the voltages. I'll be going to a evga classified 3 board as well... I'm already watercooled (chipset included) and will be as well with the new board.

 

[groberts101]

I'll sum it up quite easily. Anyone who thinks that R0 with 6 SSD's is not faster than 1 single drive of similar capacity?.. is just fooling themselves. Seeing is believing and multitasking is where you get your money back in time saved. The one's who use larger SSD arrays(many of whom where skeptics themselves at one point) will tell you what the real deal is. And no benchmarks will be required to see it either.

Bandwidth is like a pie. The larger it is?.. the more can go around without someone getting shorted with just a 2 bite sliver in the process.

And I breezed through that review quickly. Who the hell in their right mind would use HDTune to test with SSD? lol And as usual with these sorts of tests.. they forgot to enable write-back caching for best results. Ram caching with larger arrays gets amplified even more.

Then there was the speed loss of sandforce based drives to that of JUST HALF of one single drives speeds?.. C'mon now.. these figgin' drives won't even throttle that low unless you hit the LTT from writing MASSIVE TB's worth of data over a very short timeframe.

Terrible overall test for the most part and isn't even worth the read for much more than just seeing where they errored and found "realistic inconsistency" during testing methodolgy. When it comes to SSD.. they should just stick with "reporting it" rather than "testing it".

 

[exdeath]

thanks for the heads up... i personally have 4 256gb Crucial M4's on the way to run in Raid 0 (really in prep for ivy bridge, i know my sata 2 ports on my x58 won't do this setup justice)

Get a LSI MegaRAID 9620 if you are running more than 2 drives in RAID. Intel SATA III internal ports or go external card IMO.